With Day One and Day Two of MERGE! long gone, I had the pleasure of kicking off Day Three moderating the Domain Name Solutions for Blockchain Challenges panel which consisted of Jothan Frakes, Jebidiah Burnett, Toby Hall, Dave Evanson, and Jodee Rich.

Day Two opened the doors to many more exhibitors as well as a CMS Summit Keynote from Robert Jacobi, Executive Vice President of Perfect Dashboard.

As with Day One of MERGE!, the day was filled with many sessions and networking opportunities.

From Slither.io to Clothes.io to CodePen.io to a growing list of personal and company brands, .io domains have become the darling domain of tech startups and domain investors.

The Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for .io was originally assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory before tech world dubbed it “input/output” domain for the next great tech idea.

There have been and are many tech startups using a .io domain to brand their digital presence.

It’s hard to believe a year has passed since MERGE! burst onto the scene in its inaugural debut.

Many attendees have converged to meet in Orlando, Florida this year at the Hilton Orlando Lake Buena Vista – Disney Springs Area to pick up where we left off last year discussing an array of digital principles — Domains, Hosting, Digital Search, CMS, Cryptocurrency, IP, Blockchain, eCommerce and Security.

If you’re new to the domain investing (even if you’re not), then you likely encounter a how cumbersome of a task it is to identify undervalued domains.

From NameJet to GoDaddy to Dynadot to SnapNames along with many more domain auction aftermarket platforms, identifying and narrowing in on undervalued domains — whether expired, public, private, or closeout — is a full time job in itself.

Thousands of domains expire in auction daily (as a subset of data is shown via DomainState.com chart below), and an unidentified number of those domains go on to be caught, or deleted and made available for hand registration (small percentage, but still happens).

In today’s tech-driven world, it’s a given to establish a digital presence for one’s personal or company brand.

Now whether or not this digital presence uses a .com or non-.com domain name is an ongoing debate — one I shall refrain from addressing today somewhat.

While most may not agree on which domain extension should represent one’s digital presence — .com has long ruled the web for personal and company branding — ALL can agree upon a digital presence being a MUST HAVE some 30 years into the Internet journey.

And while the majority agree that a brand should have a single domain name, often overlooked is whether or not a brand should build a relevant domain portfolio beyond its primary domain name.